Monthly Archives: September 2015

The famous philosopher, Confucius, once said “The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.” While Confucius lived centuries before computers or the Internet ever existed he had a point that is still completely valid, we all need to sharpen our tools every now and then.

Chrome extensions might be one of the most undervalued tools we have at our disposal, and every once in a while it’s good to see what extensions you could be using to a greater extent. Especially if you spend all day on a computer and happen to work in online marketing. There are so many extensions out there but I have a few which I find truly helpful on weekly basis. I’ve outlined 5 of my favorite Chrome extensions that help me do my job in online marketing. Hopefully, they can help you “sharpen your tools”:

One of the most frustrating things a PPC manager can deal with is an improperly placed tag of any sort. I’ve been victim to far too many Webmasters who either didn’t place a tag or failed to properly implement my conversion codes and remarketing tags. The good news is Tag Assistant from Google will save you from all that by allowing you to quickly check your pages for your tags. It goes one step further and actually troubleshoots any issues with the tag so you can identify problems quickly.

Are you really an SEO Manager if you don’t have the MozBar extension? Alright, maybe that’s too harsh, but seriously this extension is a big time saver when it comes to doing a lot of the research I find myself doing as a SEO manager. MozBar is capable of quite a bit for just an extension. For starters, you can quickly check out SEO metrics right on the search engine results page. Speaking of search, another valuable feature of MozBar is the ability to create custom searches with modifiers like city, state, and even search engine. Then you can take it one step further an actually get an analysis of your on-page elements such as title, meta description, headers and more.

If you’ve ever done a FB ad… you will understand how valuable this tool is for your advertising campaigns. This is essentially Tag Assistant for Facebook Pixels (custom audience pixels or conversion tracking pixels). You can quickly see if the pixel is placed on the correct page and also see if there happen to be any issues with it that you may need to troubleshoot.

This nifty extensions allow you to quickly shorten links to share wherever you please. Since you are signed into your Bit.ly account it saves all of them so you can still go back and check out your latest stats on links you’ve recently shared. So if I come across an article I love and I want to share on social media I can select the extension and right there on the page copy my shortened url to share.

Eye Dropper is pretty much the perfect extension for a graphic designer or an online marketer who occasionally needs to function as one. I’m relatively new to Eye Dropper, but I already like it a lot because it allows you to quickly pick a color from any website and save it for later. It’s very much like the eye dropper tool in Photoshop except now you can do it all while surfing the web without having Photoshop open at all. You can save it to use in photoshop or in presentations you might be working on. In particular, I find it useful when creating custom infographics or social content for clients and wanting to use their company’s colors in it.

This one is more of a personal favorite, but I originally found it two years back when I was purely a social media manager so it is still completely applicable. To get things started you download the Pin It Button and sign in to your Pinterest account. From that point on when you’re browsing the web and you see a pair of boots you want to check out later you can hit your Pin It button and it will pull the image and link to web page into a pin and pin it to your board of choice all while not even leaving the webpage. I use it as a way to save gift ideas or just create a dream board of things I want on Pinterest. You can also use it to save articles to go back and read later. It’s a visual way to bookmark pages you want to check out later.

What are some of your favorite Chrome extensions? I always love finding new ones, so comment below!

Want to know how you stack up against your competition when it comes to Adwords? There’s actually a handy report easily accessibly in Adwords that will tell you JUST that.

Here’s how you get to it:

Select the “Details” dropdown menu on the all campaigns dashboard view after logging into your Adwords account and select all under “Auction Insights.”

Once in the Auction Insights Report there are some pretty interesting insights. First, you’ll see who Adwords considers your competitors based on the keywords you are bidding on. In this example (screenshot below), the competitor sites are blurred out, but in your account you’ll have actual URLs of competitors. You may find you have some competitors you weren’t even aware of who are running on the very same keywords as you.

There are some terms in the report that are familiar to you if you’ve been running ads already such as “average position” this is the average position of your ads. However, the rest of these columns may be new to you, so I have written out explanations below:

Impression share: shows you how often you are showing up for your keywords. The higher this is the better you’re doing at this. (We’re getting close to 94% of the impression share in the above example which is great!)

Overlap rate: the percentage of times that your ads show WITH your competitor’s ads.

Position above rate: this is the percentage of times that a competitor is ranking above you. Perhaps you have a competitor who is ranking above you a good amount of time. In this screenshot below I have one competitor who is ranking above me over 70% of the time. Crazy right? Don’t freak out just yet. Take a look at the overlap rate, we only overlap on terms under 9% of the time. So while looking at this report, focus on your main competitors and don’t get caught up in trying to out bid every competitor on every term.

Top of page rate: another interesting metric calculates the percentage of times you or your compeitior’s ads are showing up in the top three ads on a page.

Outranking share: this one is a bit of formula which I’ve written out below,

Number of times your ad ranked higher in an auction than a competitor (plus) the number of times your ads showed when your competitor’s did not (divided by) total number of ad auctions you participated in.

The auction insights report is incredibly simple but a great resource to use to see how you stack up against the competition.